On a lovely May afternoon last spring, a group of Cranston’s elementary school principals and a couple of ex-principals who now work in central administration, gathered for their monthly book-group discussion.

The principals looked a bit weary, but greeted one another warmly in the foyer of a Garden City restaurant. At 3:30 in the afternoon, they’re still in their power suits, having only just finished supervising dismissal — getting the kids on the right bus, shooing the walkers home, and trying to find the adult who forgot to pick up the kid.

They were reading Difficult Conversations, by the Harvard Negotiation Project, which also produced Getting to Yes.

The text explores why certain conversations are so hard to handle, and suggests how to make them more productive and less toxic. Firing someone, giving bad news or criticizing performance will never be fun. But the book suggests ways of getting in and out of such conversations with fewer misunderstandings and emotional wounds.

School principals have difficult conversations all day long — with kids, staff, parents, central office, neighbors, substitutes, and the electrician who said he’d be in and out of that classroom in an hour but wasn’t. Principals have tremendous responsibilities — everything from school reform and student achievement to running out of toilet paper. They mentor new and struggling teachers, and support all others. They set the orderly, focused tone of the building for kids and staff. Their days are an on-going rush of interruptions by someone who needs their attention now. Just saying no to some of those folks is itself difficult.

The Cranston principals settled at a big table and ordered Diet Cokes, most of them. They always begin by going around the table to express a short thought about the book.

Not everyone was gung ho about the book’s value. But as each person chose a sentence or two to read out loud, even those principals who had been skeptical found lots of practical applications.

For example, they all have to listen to irate parents, and often. The book strongly suggests that when someone is frothing anger, your best strategy is to hear them out completely. The principals sighed their agreement. Listening is certainly the right thing to do, but it takes precious time.

Principals tend to have overly-busy days in under-staffed schools. But in Rhode Island, administrators’ conversations are greatly complicated by the principal’s lack of authority and power. For example, far too often parents must hear the enraging “I’m sorry, but the contract — policy, regulation or law — prevents me from doing anything about this.”

With me at the table, the principals were especially discrete. But it became clear that their two most consistently difficult conversations are those having to do with coaxing the faculty, individually and collectively, to focus on what’s best for kids, and coping with their share of frustrated parents. These conversations are made more difficult, objectively, by the constraints on powers of the principalship in the state.

In Massachusetts, principals can hire new faculty and make many of their own decisions. The Massachusetts 1993 Education Reform Act shifted much authority to the principals, with the understanding that they would delegate and share that authority with their staff. The quality of that state’s public education is now considered the best in the nation; empowering their school leaders certainly helped get them there.

In Rhode Island, the principal has the same mammoth responsibilities, but only nominal authority. Instead of allowing the principal and her staff to use their brains to solve problems, policymakers have prefabricated many school-level decisions and embedded them in labor/management contracts, state laws, Regents regulations and district policies. Principals don’t make decisions so much as interpret and implement the decisions made for them. The compliance-driven nature of their jobs crushes creative problem-solving.

Of course, school principals in all states, including Massachusetts, are overregulated to some degree. But Rhode Island principals are among the most heavily micromanaged, which is to say, they are asked to do their jobs with one hand tied behind their backs.

So it’s encouraging to find a group of principals working together on a really good text about reducing the ire and ill will built into their professional lives. Cranston’s elementary schools are consistently among the best in the state, so their commitment is paying off.

But much of their frustration is unnecessary and counterproductive to good education. If the governor, legislature and the public are serious about improving schools, they need to admit that a principal’s job is difficult to the brink of impossible. Rhode Island would be wise to follow Massachusetts’ lead and shift more authority to principals, so they and their schools can finally get academic traction.

All of us could suffer through fewer absurdly difficult conversations about the state of local education.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.